So I get the new hard drive (160gb IDE drive), and so I have to replace my old 20gb one.

…But I don’t want to lose my data… solution? Imaging software. Yeah, I created a disk image using my father’s handy work copy of Acronis True Image (there’s plenty of free ones out there, but this one was handy, and bug-free). After saving my image to an external USB hard drive, I could place the new hard drive inside the machine, and use the same software to restore the image from the external drive. While restoring it, though, I wanted it to take up the whole 160gb, not just 20gb. Expanding a disk image is pretty easy to do, really. It’s usually a built-in feature. Heck, even Windows itself can expand partitions into empty drive space. Shrinking partitions, that’s another story…

The whole process took a few hours, maybe… Not too bad. A small price to pay for total control over a hard drive 8 times bigger than my toy drive of 20gb.

And voila. Data migrated successfully.

What if I want to put a second hard drive in? Well, the Dimension 4500S’s case is a little too small to fit a second one in there(despite the fact that the ribbon cable itself has more than one input point on it… they prolly thought they were funny when they assebled that box, huh).